This invention is directed to a system and methodology of remotely storing personalized information associated with mobile customer premises equipment, and more particularly, the consistent automatic updating and backing up of information associated with respective customer premises equipment (CPE).
As electronic devices such as cell phones, iPods, MP3 players, pagers, personal digital assistants (PDA), even personal computers have become more and more personalized, they are used to store more and more user-specific data. By way of example, cell phones contain address books, stored numbers, calendars and appointments, individualized ring tones, downloaded licensed applications such as location-based services, music, or the like. To some extent, almost all of these individualized features are stored at the cell phone to be operated upon by the telephone or in cooperation with remote servers.
The creation of many of these databases, such as address or calendar, is time intensive requiring manual uploading at the device, such as utilizing the keypad of the telephone in the cell phone example, or the keypad of the PDA in the PDA example to enter each address or calendar event.
It is known in the art for certain devices to download some of the personal information such as stored phone numbers in a cell phone directory or stored calendar information in a PDA. These methods require actual hard wiring in a cradle or other device between the CPE and either a second CPE, such as when transferring stored numbers from cell phone to cell phone, or to some other user-controlled device such as the user's personal computer when synchronizing a PDA with a personal database in the computer. This method has been satisfactory, however, it suffers from the disadvantage that backing up the data or transferring the data only occurs when the user has both the backup device/transfer device and the CPE at the same physical location, and only when the user is able to make the physical connection and spend the time making the transfer.
Furthermore, in the case of a cell phone, because no such cradle is widely available, the data is not backed up, but rather transferred from one cell phone to another at time of purchase by authorized technicians. If the cell phone is either lost or damaged, then the transfer of data cannot occur requiring the user to manually reenter and download all of the personalized information, a time-consuming effort, rife with potential human inputting error. Additionally, many times the settings are forgotten and therefore irrevocably lost. Lastly, transferring from device-to-device may be prevented as a result of the incompatibility of the first device to the second. Not all backup software on a PC is compatible with the synchronization of a PDA, by way of example.
Accordingly, a system and method for overcoming the shortcomings of the prior art are desired.